


Scribblings of the Fifth City

by Violsva



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Cats, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 15:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16835278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violsva/pseuds/Violsva
Summary: I cannot promise that everything here happened in Fallen London, but it wouldn't have happened without Fallen London.Originally posted atvortigraine.tumblr.com.





	1. Chapter 1

When you bought [the book](http://vortigraine.tumblr.com/post/127268584856/steampunktendencies-fantasy-steampunk-journal) it was a slim blank volume bound in unmarked brown snakeskin. At least, you thought it was snakeskin. The bookseller smiled at you politely and took your money without comment, and when you tried to show a friend her stall a week later it wasn’t there. But shopkeepers move on quickly, outside of the Bazaar.

You used it to keep track of information too sensitive to keep with you but not too sensitive to write down. It stayed in a trunk in your lodgings.

Even the best lights here are dim, and you cannot afford the best. Foxfire candles give off a dim, greenish glow, and so you cannot say when the leather (if it is leather) began to pick up that reddish hue. Perhaps it was there all along. You wouldn’t have noticed it if that rat hadn’t knocked the lamplighter beeswax into the fire.

You’re also not sure when the book began to grow heavier. As you write, you never draw closer to the end.

You have just recorded something you learned from one of the Duchess’s cats when you notice a strange bulge on the cover. You pull the candle closer.

The scales have grown smaller and closer together there, in a long bumpy S-shape raised organically from the surface. The patterns of the scales around it have adjusted as well, perhaps. You hadn’t really paid attention to them before.

But the book is the perfect size, and already contains all your notes (you check that they are still there), and the creamy pages with their slightly rough texture seem almost to beg to be written on - no, not to beg. To bargain, no, to promise, to offer themselves as if writing on them is a privilege.

Is the bulge growing larger, or changing shape? You can’t tell. It happens slowly, if it happens, and surely each time you take the book out to write it has not changed from the last. if not, how has it certainly changed from how it was six weeks ago? Were there always those smooth patches in the scales? Is it becoming more defined?

It must be. Surely before now you could not make out the secondary lines branching out from the centre, the fine tracery within the smooth planes, the small shining claws at the ends of the limbs - they must be limbs, just as the smooth spaces are the membranes of wings. The head is growing higher than the rest of the form, shaping itself into an arched brow narrowing into a snout. Surely this cannot -

But there is someone at the door, and you quickly shove the book back into the trunk. It wouldn’t do for the secrets it holds to fall into the wrong hands.

A week later (perhaps - it’s hard to tell), after meeting a surprising well-informed society miss, you take the book out without thinking. You are so used to sliding your fingers over the bulge on the cover that you do not remember what you saw before until closing it again, your clues recorded.

When you peer at it again, searching for new changes, it is hard to remember exactly what was already there. The tail, curling around the spine and ending in a point on the back cover - is that new? The fine edges of the wings? The clear delineation between the claws on each foot? You cannot be sure.

You put it back in the trunk, though it does not seem to want to leave your hand.

It is thicker now, surely. Surely you should have reached the end of it by now. But all of your secrets are still there, and you keep writing in it, feeling the perfect give of the paper, the smooth slide of your pen. It never scratches, never leaks or sprays ink, not in this book.

You begin to leave it out of the trunk, sometimes. On a high shelf, away from stray eyes, but closer and closer to the windows, so the moonish light lies across its cover.

You can almost make out a face on the narrow head. Its eyes are shut.

You visit friends, the Carnival, the Shuttered Palace. You go on an Expedition in the Forgotten Quarter. You talk to cats and Clay Men and devils and aristocrats. No matter how long you leave the book, it is never disturbed, not by rats or bats or your landlord.

If you do not write in it, it stays the same. But you cannot stop writing in it.

You fill it with secrets after your investigations, then, except that it cannot be filled. Every time you open it, it is slightly thicker than the time before. The scales lie in amazingly fine detail. The wings are perfect, the edges slightly raised. The claws shine like metal, gold or brass. The mouth is open just enough for a fang to slip through.

The eyes are still shut. If you stare at them for too long, in the flickering green candlelight, the lids seem to flutter.

A hint from the Duchess about trade with the surface. A Clay Poet’s chilling description of Polythreme. A frivolous but blackmail-worthy flirtation. The true identity of a devil’s follower. Tea with a rather unpleasant vicar. A dry whisper from a Tomb-Colonist. You keep writing. The pages turn infinitely.

Someday soon, the eyes will open.

* * *

The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! Compared to it, a skeleton’s fat!


	2. Chapter 2

“[They play themselves](http://vortigraine.tumblr.com/post/127346643216/steampunktendencies-mechanical-violins),” the lunatic gasps in horror. “They play themselves…”

Nonsense, of course. The machinery is rat-designed and well polished, and the shape of the instruments is perhaps rather unnerving, but they still need someone to start them off. Besides, what’s so terrible about instruments that play themselves? Useful, really - human musicians do have problems keeping an even tempo.

Too much honey, you decide, or perhaps the wrong kind of honey.

“They play themselves,” he moans again, sprawled on the floor. An L.B. gives him a kick.

* * *

The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! It ate my dog! It fought with my hat!


	3. Transparent Cats?

The Duchess always has at least one cat with her. But sometimes, when a tabby is perched on her shoulder, she also seems to be petting the air…

What secrets would they hold, these hypothetical cats? What can they watch, without even needing a shadow to blend in to?

Was that door open a second too long? Did something just brush your ankles?

* * *

Starveling Kitty! Starveling Kitty! Call it fierce, but never pretty!


	4. Chapter 4

The Cunning Linguist has already heard that joke, thank you. You don’t make another.

They are now moderately well known in the University, but it wasn’t always so. They first got into the Library after delivering a message to the Dean of Recalcitrant Zoology. They were sixteen, and dodging librarians was easy after years of dodging constables and spirifers. They stayed for days, until they were too hungry to read.

Eventually, after months of sneaking in every time they had the chance, the librarians had caught enough glimpses of them that they began to assume they belonged there. When a junior page was fired for drinking coffee on the job they slipped into place as his replacement.

It was strange, taking respectable employment, but useful. No one ever thought to ask where they slept.

It was not precisely the love of books that drove them, though, as they rose in respectability and knowledge.

The Correspondence cannot be kept near books, of course. But other languages of the Cities can.

If you need a translation of the language of the Third City, or the Fourth, or the Second (though how did you get your hands on anything from the Second City, and what might the Masters say if they found out?), the Cunning Linguist is known to be an excellent resource. But they are more known for something else.

They are likely how you acquired that Second City codex, that copy of a papyrus shred mentioning the theft of the First City, that yellow-backed novel from the Surface. They don’t care for London’s own locally-sourced sedition, but ask them about attacks on the Masters in Norwegian or Chinese or Quechua, and they will - just possibly, just perhaps, and not for any purpose but the academic - have a source. And ask them about the links between those - the connections between the Third and Fourth Cities, the accounts of Tomb Colonists who still remember the Fourth (and worse, the time In Between the Cities), the transmission of texts through historical linguistic change, and the similarities between cheap modern pamphlets by the most radical anarchists and ancient stone tablets written in patterns of triangles, and they will wax eloquent for hours.

Normally, perhaps, the University would think twice about sheltering someone with such dangerous interests. But a childhood in the Crosses prepares one for more high society maneuvering than the upper classes would suspect, and you have realized, by now, that the Cunning Linguist’s title is purely descriptive.

* * *

The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! Bane of scientists! Scourge of bats!


	5. Chapter 5

They turn up sometimes in the Forgotten Quarter. Usually a sudden gust of wind will throw them across one’s path. [They look like dead leaves](http://vortigraine.tumblr.com/post/127813837151/violsva-mymodernmet-blockquote), with tiny scenes painted on them in darker shades of brown.

Sometimes it’s the tall buildings of a city. Sometimes a ship. Sometimes a winged figure, soaring into a night sky (is it the sky?)…

The silver tree in the centre of the Forgotten Quarter has no leaves, and there are no other trees. The ones in London proper died decades ago. Where do they come from? And who paints them?

It seems an odd thing for someone to have collected and preserved for three decades. But people are wild for mementos of the surface, and dead leaves are perhaps as good as any. But no collector would be so careless as to let them vanish in the wind.

Some - Madame Shoshana, for one - will say they are omens of the future, and the scenes on them can be interpreted (for a price). But that doesn’t address the fundamental question of their origin.

* * *

The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! When London fell it hissed and spat!


	6. Chapter 6

Some say [they can be found](http://vortigraine.tumblr.com/post/128062841716/asylum-art-2-blind-artist-makes-cracked-log) on the Elder Continent. Some say the first seedling grew on a glowing mountain. Some say nothing of their location, but glance quickly to the west - some to the north. But apart from location the stories agree: light grows from trees.

Or glows from trees; the fissures in their bark seem to reveal a luminous heart. Cut down, there is no evidence of this - the light starts halfway into the trunk, and cutting close enough to examine it invariably causes it to die.

But if you avoid that, the aged and seasoned logs can be used for lighting, and they don’t seem to wear out. In London they can only be found in the possession of the wealthy and well-connected. The Gracious Widow is known to use them, though no one’s sure when.

Ask a zee-captain to tell you about them, and he’ll spin you tales for hours. Ask him if he can purchase some for you on his next voyage and he’ll shut up at once. Perhaps you simply aren’t asking the right questions.

* * *

The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! Step on its tail and end up a mat!


	7. Mercery

**Mrs Stickler’s[Studded Corset](http://vortigraine.tumblr.com/post/127434220756/grammarwoman-nepekittyleijon-have-i-ever)!** Finest leather, set with 72 well-placed spring-loaded steel spikes. Support your figure while discouraging unwanted advances. **Dangerous +5; Persuasive +2.**

 **Every Lady’s Favourite Dramatic Black Cloak:** It has pockets. **Shadowy +2; Persuasive +1.**


End file.
